Whitesboro's Concerned Citizens Take Up the Task

Looking proudly into the future, with George White's blessing

My forthcoming book on the history of Whitesboro, N.J. — tentatively titled The Promise of Freedom — retraces the growth of the village from its founding in 1903 to the present day. It is a story preserved largely by the efforts of a small band of dedicated townspeople who refused to let their legacy slip away, and who I met in late 2001, shortly after the publication by LSU Press of my biography of George Henry White, subtitled An Even Chance in the Race of Life.

I had been invited to speak by Stedman Graham — a well-known author and businessman in his own right, and a native of Whitesboro — at the group’s annual reunion festival. The increasingly popular Labor Day weekend gathering, in progress since 1989, was the brainchild of Graham and a handful of local religious leaders and educators. In 1988, when the group dubbed the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro began to coalesce, the all-black village founded by the former U.S. congressman I had written about was in danger of becoming a historical footnote.

Its population, never large, was stagnant or declining. The railroads which had helped spur its development had long since fallen silent, as passenger and freight service were discontinued to nearby tourist resort Cape May City. Meanwhile, the modern Garden State Parkway carried hundreds of thousands of automobiles a year past the only exit that marked the little town. Many of its young people — an amazing number, I quickly learned — went on to college and professional pursuits, but rarely or never returned to live there. Graham, whose parents still lived in Whitesboro, often came home to visit, but was dismayed at the shabby state of the town he had always loved.

The Concerned Citizens decided to do something remarkable to turn things around. Call everyone back home, once a year, at least, to join a new effort to re-invent a town which seemed to have lost its purpose. Founded in an era of strict racial segregation, Whitesboro had served its purpose well for decades, providing a safe and secure start for its children, but in a new era of integrated schools and emerging opportunities elsewhere, seemed almost irrelevant to the modern world outside.

That year, 1988, also marked the 70th anniversary of the death of George White, a prominent lawyer and former elected prosecutor who served in Congress from 1897 until 1901, then oversaw the town’s development first from Washington D.C., and from Philadelphia, Pa., the city to which he moved after 1905, and where he died in 1918. His development company’s advertisements, found in many black weekly newspapers after 1901, promised a brighter future for the pioneers who heard his call:

White envisioned his new town as a refuge for Southern black families fleeing the political oppression and economic deprivation of the Jim Crow era — a self-sufficient home where hard work and determination were, quite literally, intended as their own rewards. Situated within a forest on the site often described as a former slave plantation in Cape May County, it occupied about 2,000 acres of fertile farmland, once the trees were cleared and the lumber used to build new homes.

Most of the first wave of settlers came from Columbus County, N.C., where White, born in 1852, was raised by a free, mixed-race family in a swampy area known for pine trees and their valuable product, turpentine. They were soon joined by newcomers from Virginia and Pennsylvania, among other states — and by 1910, built churches and a school for dozens of small children listed in that year’s census.

It was not the first all-black settlement in New Jersey — Gouldtown, Lawnside, and Springtown are older, more familiar communities, among perhaps two dozen communities founded mostly by freed slaves, both before and after New Jersey ended the practice of slavery in 1846. But it was almost certainly the first to be built from the ground up by investors from outside the state.

Thanks to infusions of cash by that small group of affluent black investors, the town took root, and for a time, even flourished, reaching a population of perhaps 500 by the time of the Great Depression.

Investor Samuel H. Vick, postmaster of Wilson, N.C.

Investor Ida Gibbs Hunt, of Washington, D.C.

Investor Wiley H. Bates, of Annapolis, Md.

Investor Paul Laurence Dunbar, of Washington, D.C.

Its many farms and small businesses provided a fairly comfortable living for the pioneers and their families, who modeled themselves on the rather demanding standards of the example White himself had posed: “a colony of Negroes who will live and work by themselves … of good character, steady and industrious habits,” willing to build their own homes and lives in an uncertain, if promising, new environment, “beautifully located, high and healthy, entirely free of malaria,” and easy to get to, located near “three railroads and two county turnpikes.”

In April 1904, the county’s Cape May Herald painted a friendly journalistic portrait of a new town destined, almost certainly, for success:

Whitesboro is a quickly constructed village, built in a night, at the old saying goes.
Well, it was not. It has a finely constructed hotel, of the modern system, and it presents
a very good appearance. It has just been freshly painted and seems like neatness itself.
The houses that have been built there are not like ones that sometimes make up a colored
settlement elsewhere, but are modernized and strictly up-to-date, most of them are newly
painted inside and out, even the barns bring kept neat and clean.

Fast forward to 1988, a period whose eight decades of existence a 2001 CCW chronicler compressed into short, telling sentences:

During the process of growth, there have been good times and some times that were not
so good—but such is progress. As the saying goes, “There is no progress with a struggle.”
The Concerned Citizens group … continues to look forward to continue to improve our
community, and the quality of all our lives.

Graham’s original colleagues included Elder Edgar Robinson, pastor of Christ Gospel Church; Dr. Theodore Johnson, former superintendent of the Cape May County schools; Theodore (Teddy) Bryant, a teacher at Middle Township High School in the nearby county seat of Cape May Courthouse, and Rev. George Thompson, pastor of the local First Baptist Church. In due course, they were joined by other local men, notably Bernie Blanks, who soon became the CCW president, a post he still holds today, and women.

For 34 years since its founding, the CCW has championed a myriad of projects — including construction of sidewalks, water and sewer infrastructure, and both a food pantry for needy citizens and an after-school homework club for any student who needs guidance, plus much more. It has become a 501 ( c ) 3 nonprofit organization, overseeing the distribution of a scholarship fund with more than $1 million in contributions. The annual homecoming festival draws hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitors over the Labor Day weekend, an increasingly popular attraction, both for golfers at the John Roberson Golf Tournament and folks who prefer to feast on local cooking and good fellowship.

And while the idea of a small paid, professional staff has been floated occasionally, the CCW remains a volunteer group, depending on the availability of committed local residents. They meet in the rooms of the renovated Whitesboro Grammar School, a vintage-1910 building which has long since shed its role as a school for youngsters — Graham and Blanks went there in the 1950s and 1960s — but nowadays, stands as a forward-looking beacon of hope, retelling the 120-year-old story of George White’s dream, in a building he himself erected, for all to hear.

If today’s village is neither all-black, nor as small or self-contained as the original, it continues to preach the “George White gospel,” of self-help and entrepreneurship, with a reverence for its humble beginnings matched only by the loyalty of its residents and the size of the crowds who come back each Labor Day. I attended the festival again in 2008, and was even more impressed. It is truly a “labor of love,” as Graham calls it, conducted by the men and women who love their town and want it to keep inspiring others.

A new Martin Luther King Jr. community center and the new U.S. Post Office, dedicated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, symbolize the twin legacies of recreation and the ZIP code — 08210 — which both define the past and project the future.

Local leaders attend the 2020 ribbon-cutting of Whitesboro’s new Post Office.

Next time: A Civil War sentry guards the heart of his adopted town